The Favor of God
I’m Not Feeling It
I’m Not Feeling It
At some point in most believers’ lives, someone tells them that God wants to bless them. And it sounds wonderful. It is, in fact, true. The trouble comes with what we quietly assume that blessing looks like.
Usually it looks like things going well, prospering.
I don’t say that to be cynical. I say it because I have assumed it too. There have been seasons of my life when the gap between where I was and where I believed God was taking me felt less like a journey and more like evidence — evidence that I had gotten something wrong, or that the blessing had been rerouted to someone more deserving. The good thing I was trusting God for hadn’t arrived. The door I believed He had opened had closed. And somewhere in the silence, a quiet question formed: does He still have this?
Maybe you know that question. If you do, I want to introduce you to my friend Joseph.
A Man Who Had Every Reason to Wonder
Genesis gives us more of Joseph’s story than almost any other figure in the Old Testament — fourteen chapters, more than Abraham, more than Isaac, more than Jacob. Which tells you something. God wanted this one told slowly, in full, so we wouldn’t miss what He was doing in it.
The broad strokes are familiar. Favored son. Coat of many colors. Brothers who couldn’t stand him. A pit. A slave caravan heading to Egypt. A household in Potiphar’s service. A false accusation. A prison cell. Years of silence.
And then — improbably, dramatically — the throne room of Pharaoh. Second in command over all of Egypt. The man who had been thrown into a pit by his own brothers ends up holding the grain supply for the known world.
That’s quite the arc. That’s the story most people know.
What most people gloss over is Genesis 39.
Five Times in One Chapter
Genesis 39 is not the triumphant chapter. It is the hard chapter — the one where Joseph is enslaved, falsely accused, and thrown into prison. It is the chapter where, if you were reading without knowing the ending, you would wonder whether God had lost the thread entirely.
And yet, five times in that single chapter, the text pauses to tell us the same thing:
“The Lord was with Joseph, and he prospered.”
“The Lord was with him and gave him success in everything he did.”
“The Lord blessed the household of the Egyptian because of Joseph.”
“The Lord was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden.”
“The Lord was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did.”
Five times. In the chapter where everything is going wrong.
The repetition is intentional. The author of Genesis, Moses, wants you to feel the collision — between the outward circumstances and the inward reality of Joseph’s life. And Moses knows that gap intimately.
But in that gap the favor of God was present. Not in spite of the suffering. Not waiting on the other side of it. Present. In it.
That reframes everything.
What “Blessing” Actually Looks Like
There is a version of Christianity — well-funded, loudly promoted, impossible to avoid if you spend any time in American church culture — that has collapsed the idea of God’s blessing into a single category: material prosperity and physical health. If God is blessing you, things are going well. If things are not going well, something is wrong.
This isn’t a new idea. It’s actually a very old one. Job’s friends believed it. The disciples believed it — “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” It is a deeply intuitive framework, and it is deeply wrong.
The story of Joseph isn’t the only counterevidence. The heroes of Hebrews 11 — the ones commended for extraordinary faith — were stoned, sawed in two, destitute, persecuted. The prophets were rejected. Paul catalogued his credentials as an apostle and the list included shipwrecks, beatings, and a thorn that didn’t go away. Jesus Himself — in whom the fullness of God’s favor dwelt — was crucified.
If the prosperity framework were true, none of that would make any sense.
What Joseph’s story reveals is that the currency of God’s blessing is wider than we think. It includes — but is not limited to — material provision and health. It also looks like insight and wisdom. Favor with people in positions of influence. Clarity in darkness. The capacity to hold together when circumstances would otherwise unravel you. The slow, patient development of character that only adversity can produce.
Thirteen years. Joseph spent thirteen years in slavery or prison. Thirteen years God was with him, favoring him, shaping him — for purposes Joseph couldn’t yet see from inside the cell.
Blessed to Be a Blessing
There’s something else in Genesis 39 worth sitting with. When the text says that “the Lord blessed the household of the Egyptian because of Joseph” — it’s telling us something about the direction of the blessing. The favor of God wasn’t primarily self-contained, just for Joseph. It flowed through Joseph outward. Potiphar’s household flourished. Pharaoh’s kingdom was preserved. Joseph’s family — and through them, the future nation of Israel — was saved from famine.
God blessed Joseph so that Joseph could be a blessing to others.
This pattern runs deep in Scripture. It goes all the way back to Abraham: “I will bless you... and you will be a blessing.” The blessing was never meant to be a destination. It was always meant to be a channel.
Which means that when I am in a season where I can’t see the outward evidence of blessing — when the ventures haven’t survived and my reality doesn’t match my map — the question worth asking isn’t only where is my blessing? It’s also: who am I being prepared to bless? What is being formed in me right now that will one day flow through me toward someone else who needs it?
I don’t always have a clear answer to that question. But asking it changes something in me.
What Joseph Understood
At the end of the Joseph narrative, after the dramatic reunion with his brothers — the ones who sold him into slavery — there is a moment of extraordinary clarity. His brothers are afraid that, with their father Jacob now dead, Joseph will finally take his revenge. And Joseph says something that only makes sense if you have lived through thirteen years of hard grace and come out the other side with your theology intact:
“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”
He isn’t minimizing what happened to him. He isn’t pretending the pit wasn’t real or the prison wasn’t dark or the years weren’t long. He’s saying something more precise: God was in it. Not despite it. In it. The same pit his brothers dug became the first step in a journey that saved a civilization.
The favor of God doesn’t always look like what we call a blessing. Sometimes it looks like preparation. Sometimes it looks like refinement. Sometimes it looks like thirteen years in a place you didn’t choose, being shaped for a purpose you can’t yet see.
But it is favor. It is real. And He is with you — in the middle of it.
“You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.” — Psalm 139:5
The Question That Changes Things
I want to offer you the same question that has slowly been changing how I read my own story.
Not: why isn’t God blessing me? But: what does His favor actually look like right now?
Because I suspect it is there — present in the chapter that doesn’t feel triumphant yet. Present in the insight you gained from the season that didn’t work out. Present in the character being quietly formed in you during the years that aren’t making it into the highlight reel. Present in the favor you’ve found with people you didn’t expect, in places you didn’t choose.
Joseph couldn’t see the throne room from the prison cell. He couldn’t connect the dots forward. But they were being connected. Every one of them.
The favor of God doesn’t require an explanation to be real. It requires trust.
And maybe — if we look carefully — we’ll find that we’ve been living inside it all along. - This is The Way
If this landed somewhere real for you, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. And if you know someone in the middle of a season that doesn’t look like blessing yet — feel free to pass it along.
For Reflection
Before you close this page, sit with one of these:
When you hear that “God wants to bless you,” what do you automatically picture? How does Joseph’s story challenge or expand that picture?
Where in your own story have you been able to look back and say: God was in that — even though it didn’t feel like it at the time?
Joseph couldn’t see the purpose of his suffering from inside it. Is there a hard season you’re currently in — or have recently come through — where you’re beginning to wonder what God might have been building? What would it look like to trust the pattern even before it’s fully visible?
© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way